Gowdy is a man of principles, whether you agree with him or not: Barnett

After representing Greenville, Spartanburg and other areas of the Upstate in Congress since 2010, U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy announced via Twitter Wednesday morning that he will leave politics and return to the justice system.
Lauren Young/Digital Producer

Trey Gowdy stood beneath a shade tree with his wife and two school-age children and told a story of his parents’ rise from poverty and the lessons about individualism and personal accountability it taught him.

That was the lede of a story I wrote on June 1, 2009, in covering Gowdy’s announcement that he planned to seek the 4th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, then held by Bob Inglis.

There, on the front lawn of the future congressman’s suburban Spartanburg home, I got my first chance to measure the man whom I had previously only talked with on the phone about criminal cases he was prosecuting as 7th Circuit Solicitor.

He was the fourth person to announce plans to try to unseat Inglis, who had been drawing increasing criticism from his own party for such things as believing that the climate change deniers had it wrong. I was at Eastside High School in 2006 when Inglis made a long-distance call to a classroom — from Antarctica — to explain to the students how his mind had been changed on the subject after seeing the work of scientists there at the McMurdo Research Station.

I don’t remember Gowdy making any jabs about global warming in his criticism of the incumbent at his announcement press conference, but he said he believed Inglis had "strayed from his conservative roots."

At the time, I thought Gowdy was pretty much of a long-shot. It’s hard to unseat an incumbent in Congress, even if they’ve fallen out of favor with some of the more extreme elements of their party (See Lindsey Graham). I figured if anybody had a chance it would have been longtime state Sen. David Thomas rather than a prosecutor not many people outside of Spartanburg had heard of.

But this was the year of the Tea Party, and Gowdy became its standard bearer here. After claiming 34 percent of the primary vote to Inglis’ 24 percent, he went on to win 70 percent of the total in the runoff.

Now, I didn’t agree with Gowdy on a lot of issues, but I sized him up as a straight shooter. I judged him to be a man of good character. He seemed like a guy who had well thought-out convictions and a seriousness and sincerity that reminded me of another former Republican congressman, Carroll Campbell, who of course went on to become our governor.

He seemed like a man on a mission.

Not more than three weeks after taking office, Gowdy showed up at the Washington Center, the Greenville County School District’s special center for students who are mentally handicapped or afflicted with autism, blindness, deafness or other disabilities.

He was there at the request of the school board, which wanted to give him a tour of the school that, according to the No Child Left Behind law, was the worst in the state.

The law required students there to be tested and expected to reach the same achievement levels as everyone else.

Gowdy left the school convinced that No Child Left Behind needed to be overhauled, and Congress went on to undo the misguided legislation.

It wasn’t long before he began to be seen as a rising star within the Republican Party. His experience as a prosecutor gave him an edge in selling his ideas, making his case before Congress as if trying to convince a jury to convict.

This made him a natural choice in 2014 to head the politically charged committee looking into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which put him in the national spotlight for the next two years.

The committee's report found fault with the way the Obama administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had handled the crisis but did not, as some Republicans hoped, lead to criminal charges against Clinton. So Gowdy took heat from both Republicans and Democrats, for different reasons, after the probe was completed during the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The investigation had, of course, turned up the fact that Clinton wasn’t using a government email server but a private one for classified government business, which probably cost her the election and hence changed the course of history.

My most extensive interview of Gowdy had come in the summer of 2013, when Congress was wrangling with an issue that it continues to wrangle with today – immigration.

Sen. Lindsey Graham – my old classmate at Daniel High School – had been taking heat as a member of the “Gang of Eight” who sponsored a bipartisan measure that passed in the Senate, which would have opened the way for illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens eventually, while strengthening border security.

The Tea Party was incensed.

Gowdy, who was then chairman of the House Border Security Subcommittee, introduced a bill that would have authorized local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws. He stopped short of criticizing Graham but said he didn’t think the Gang of Eight bill would go anywhere in the House. He thought a better approach would be to handle the issue one plank at a time, rather than in a comprehensive measure.

His bill also would have opened the door for state and local governments to adopt their own immigration laws, as long as they weren't in conflict with federal law, and attack illegal immigration directly – which seemed pretty extreme to me, but he made a reasoned argument for it.

That legislation, of course, went nowhere too.

I can understand Gowdy’s frustration with the way Congress operates, the frustration that apparently prompted him to decide last week against seeking another term.

Most members of Congress, in both parties, seem more concerned about their own political futures than they do about the country’s well being.

To his credit, Gowdy wasn’t in that camp. He could easily have stayed with it and more than likely continued to rise in the party. He could have at least hitched his wagon to a bid for a federal judgeship.

Instead, he will return to the more orderly confines of the courtrooms of the Upstate, doing what he prefers to do anyway, practicing law.